By Paul Knobel
The Premier's acceptance of $1.5 billion for schools from the Gillard government is a welcome boost for NSW education. The future of NSW lies with well-educated people.
Yet education cannot exist without libraries, good libraries. It may surprise some people to know that the State Library in the 19th century had as many books - 50,000 - as the New York Public Library. Today the New York Public Library has more than 15 million physical books and the State Library close to 2 million.
The State Library covers the whole state. Yet the acquisition budget of the University of Sydney library is more than $11 million while the State Library's is about $6.5 million.
The State Library has suffered decades of neglect and needs funds to make up for the backlog of books not purchased. It needs highly trained staff in an era when an information revolution is occurring, the greatest in human history (some 10 million books are now digitised: all could be added to the library's catalogue). The library spent $500,000 in 1987 on a single manuscript, the Newton Fowell letters, when basic reference works are lacking.
The library is refusing to accept books, periodicals and other items, which are not held by the library. In Sydney we have the problem of storage, though NSW has plenty of land. It has virtually abandoned coverage in science. Forget rare Chinese books: holdings in recent Chinese books are poor. The Chinese languages Cantonese and Mandarin are together the second-most spoken in NSW. Subject librarians for Indonesia, Melanesia and Polynesia, including New Zealand, don't exist (500,000 Kiwis call Australia home).
Since freedom of information is a vital principle in a democracy, the State Library is more important than Parliament. What should the O'Farrell government do? Firstly it should match the salary of the state librarian with that of the director of the Art Gallery. That is $400,000 if press reports are correct. Are books less important than art? The government should raise the library's acquisition budget to at least $50 million. The library in recent years has had to dip into its book acquisition budget to fund digital works (such as a database covering gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgenders issues), cutting back on the book budget.
The government should see that the State Library is properly funded and staffed. It has only recently begun to computerise its card catalogues. This money was given by (former) premier Nathan Rees but has run out. And books have not been given priority in catalogging: photographs have. Forces within the library are resisting the formation of a Constant Users Group (though the National Library and the State Library of Victoria each have one). The government also needs to ensure that NSW copyright covers digital technology.
Barry O'Farrell should ensure that the Library Council (formerly the trustees) has people who read and write books on it and are known to users of the library. Can't some of the $1.5 billion for schools be used for the library? School children do use the library and rely on it for assignments. Why is there no poet or novelist on the Library Council? What about a prominent NSW historian? Why has the Library Council not ensured that the library is properly funded? We are not living in an era of state libraries or even national libraries. The library needs renaming (it has had many names since it started life in 1826). Why not the International Library? It needs to aim high: why not the best library in the world? That means more than 20 million physical books for starters.
The State Library may be a ''memory institution'', as its latest report states, but it is a functioning research library with works in more than 300 languages in its 34 catalogues. But where is the program to record Australian Aboriginal cultures in this age of video cameras? Most papers of NSW citizens now go to the National Library, where they are virtually inaccessible.
Once these NSW manuscripts went to the Mitchell Library (which is the library's Australiana collection: many mistake it as the name for the State Library).
Other states are putting money into libraries: Queensland has a handsome new building, as does Western Australia.
The Premier and his government might even establish a poet laureateship for NSW (the idea has been put to him publicly). Authors can make a living but poets earn virtually nothing.
Paul Knobel is the founder of the Constant Users Group of the State Library.